


Yesterday's Dying

by telm_393



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Brief Self-Mutilation, Character Study, Childhood Memories, Culture Shock, Dissociation, Everybody Lives, Gen, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Hurt/Comfort, Loss of Parent(s), Mental Health Issues, Psychological Trauma, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-08-29
Packaged: 2018-12-17 01:23:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11841048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: Red Harvest deals with isolation, relocation, the past, the future, his unexpectedly crowded path, his creative version of reality, and the idea that life can change for the better.Not in that order.





	Yesterday's Dying

**Author's Note:**

> Guys, I've been working on this fic since I watched the movie. In theaters. 
> 
> It's finally done.
> 
> Yes, I do headcanon canon era Red Harvest as being this messed up. The winter smallpox and cholera epidemics in this fic did in fact happen in the Plains in the early 1860s, plus all out war, though Red Harvest's original band is more preoccupied with disease in this fic. The Comanche weren't as affected by epidemics in the 1860s as their neighbors, but it's not crazy to assume that some of the bands were heavily affected, especially considering that there was a huge epidemic shortly before Red Harvest's birth. The Red River War (1874-1875) was what resulted from the U.S. military campaign to remove any remaining roaming Native American tribes or bands like the Comanche from the Southern Plains and relocate them to reservations. The last large band of southwestern Native Americans to surrender were a Comanche band led by Quanah Parker, who was a member of the Quahadi band. In my vision of canon, Red Harvest was a member of this band. 
> 
> Note also that even though I did my research, not everything is completely accurate, and I play very fast and loose with Things and Stuff in general, especially when it comes to timeline (there's a lot of things that are kind of...mixed together in a way they may not have been irl, as in some things happen that may not have been common at that particular point in time but maybe at another, etc.), but not much more than the film does. If you do note something glaring, please tell me.
> 
> Also, there's some things here that could probably be perceived as suicidal ideation, but I don't think it warranted a tag. 
> 
> Anyway, I'll stop rambling so you can get on to Red Harvest's rambling instead.

Red Harvest lives in the same world as everybody else.

It’s just bigger.

+

Red Harvest doesn’t remember his mother or his father very well—he was only little when they died, and anyway, it was during the smallpox and most of that time is cloaked in the blank darkness of a starless night. When he actually tries to remember, which is not usually, all he gets is a memory of him in the springtime, riding his horse back to camp, and he is smart enough to know that that’s not the real world. His memories tend to be odd impressions, barring some that have been carved into his mind, because he does not cultivate them, and the sick seasons are not even gone because he couldn’t be bothered to keep them, they’re just _gone._ Mostly.

The truth lives somewhere inside of him, as does the truth of many other things that have faded away, but it only comes in bits and pieces--dreams and sudden sharp fragments of memory shoved into his mind like arrows when some little thing happens and he remembers—

Wailing, sharp hunger, hunting rabbits for himself because there’s nobody to feed him and no food anyway, offering a rabbit heart to another faceless child, peering into a tipi and seeing a man’s ruined skin sloughing off as he tries to move, everyone covered in sores white and red and bursting and running, black bile on the ground, bodies lying where they died, and him lying far away from all the dying curled under a blanket, outside because the winter cold is better than the fever-heat, the blood of those who decided to choose how they would die on the ground, the sweet smell of rotting human flesh heavy on his tongue, waiting to become one of the people piling up, feeling the evil of death slithering into his body…

There is a reason Red Harvest’s mind has done him the favor of giving him darkness instead of allowing him to go back to that place, and because that darkness is where his parents are from, they’re nothing to him, just ghosts wandering at the edges of his consciousness sometimes when he dreams, his mother’s eyes and his father’s nose and lips the things he remembers most clearly, because he can see them in his own face.

Red Harvest isn’t sure when, but he knows that at some point he began to think of what came after death, so much that he even asked people about it, but no one ever seemed to have a simple answer. The only thing he is sure of, the only thing anyone was sure of, is that after death the plains will go on forever, free of the white men, free of the sickness, free of the pain.

Free. 

Red Harvest likes the taste of freedom, blood in his mouth and rain on his tongue, and he knows, in some vague way, that it was during the time he doesn’t want to think about, can’t think about, that his memories became things that walked away when the day was done and his fantasies became universes to half live in, worlds upon worlds that grow from his surroundings but exist only in him, though they are real enough to feel, taste, see when everything is too much, too full of the sound of others speaking, laughing, breathing, always one step removed from him.

When he needs to be he is sometimes so _there_ in one way that he’s completely absent in all others, and he’s always aware of his surroundings, somewhere in the back of his mind, even at his least present.

(Usually.

Almost always.)

He is silent and stoic and friendless, but in his waking dreamworlds he is able to communicate like he wants to, able to befriend, able to truly be part of his people, able to harness his high status as the best warrior, even able to feel what young men ought to feel for a woman, able to be enough like the other men to truly be one of them, able to do _more,_ able to shift the world he knows to the one he lives in now, the one where his people and his places aren’t the same as they were just some years ago, the one where, in the end, his people lost the war and are now struggling to survive.

On the reservation, Red Harvest’s gifts don’t mean so much, and, unable to be anything but himself, he fades away.

+

To those around him Red Harvest was always half a mystery, disinterested in others, silent and alone.

It wasn’t so strange, at first, that he was withdrawn, because after the sickness (again, it was always again) it wasn’t uncommon for the survivors to walk around broken, their mourning always intense, but they moved forward, and as his band joined others that sickness had made smaller, as the disease faded and everyone kept going, it turned out that Red Harvest was just _like that now,_ maybe had always been like that, touched by something unknown, broken or maybe not put together right.

Silence was not considered a weakness, not really, but isolation was, and an overactive imagination had no place in a world that valued a practical mind.

Red Harvest functioned very well as a warrior, and that was where he began and ended.

He was always isolated, even after he didn’t have to be anymore. His bands, the one he was born into and the one he joined, tried to reach him, but he was different, and this wasn't quite a weakness either, not like it is for the white men who want everyone to be like them, as children were told that they should be what they were, but as Red Harvest grew and his gifts became clear, so did the knowledge that he was and would always be dangerously different, alone, able to hit his target every time but unable to connect with others, unrooted in the man's world, and when after his vision quest he was unable to describe it, almost incoherent, maybe even unable to remember it, even though they all knew that it had been something truly awesome, with his talents it could be nothing else—it was clear that he was meant for another life.

He was blessed, maybe.

He was crazy, maybe, or cursed.

The medicine man tried to remove the evil from him more than once, certain that something had come with the disease and the year of hunger and stayed with him, but every time, it became clear that Red Harvest did not have evil in him, he was just…himself. He was, it was eventually agreed, meant for something that nobody in the human world could grasp, not even him, and they watched him and his gifts capture horses without a struggle, kill in seconds, hunt effortlessly even when there seemed to be nothing to hunt, and thought it was a pity that he wasn’t really theirs.

He couldn’t adapt. Couldn’t even begin to. Once the Red River War was over and done, once surrender was the only choice, once the reservation and the white man’s world became the only way to survive, it was all too much for Red Harvest, who never seemed to know what he was supposed to do, because there were only a few things he was good at, and none of them involved scraping by in a strange, motionless world.

Eventually it became clear: he had to have a place in the world, with his abilities, but it certainly wasn’t with them. Not anymore. If he couldn’t be a warrior, he couldn’t be anything.

But even those who meant to leave the reservation kept him at arm’s length, this time, and he never approached, some fire inside of him put out.

By the time the moment for him to go came, the moment that made it clear that he had to move on, find the path they’d held him back from so long, nobody could bring themselves to be very sorry. He had to leave. He wanted to. It was clear to the elders, even if he himself may not have known it. They’d done him a disservice, keeping him around for such a long time simply because he was useful to them.

When he left, he didn’t say goodbye. He was there one day, gone the next.

Not much changed.

+

Red Harvest wishes he could say that he always knew that his path would take him away from his people, but he can't. He didn't see that coming, not really. He knew that he had a _special_ path, had heard it said for years, ever since his vision quest, but had always assumed his path would be one of the warrior, just better than the others, even after going away to the reservation. He figured he’d be useful in some way, maybe join some new rebellion, leave, do _something,_ it’s not like he could live that way.

But he couldn’t speak to the others who couldn’t live that way either and he supposes that that is what began the breaking, until, finally, he broke everything.

He doesn’t remember what he felt when he did what he did (because sometimes he gets like that, gets into these blurred moods where he doesn’t feel like a person, more like a thought or a dream, and then he doesn’t really remember what happened when those moods are gone, only knows the aftermath), but he knows now that it was destined to be his last feeling as a true member of his community.

Red Harvest has always been isolated, maybe even by his own design, but something cold settles in him when he realizes what he's being told: that he is so isolated that they have decided that his fate was to be cast out.

Nobody wants him around anymore. That’s the truth.

He is nearing twenty-six. It’s incredible that they tolerated him for so long, with the things he did.

(He climbs up a tree and doesn’t come down when they call him, like he doesn’t hear them at all.

He lies down one winter night and looks up at the snow falling. It takes days for his fever to break.

He is invaluable when it comes to winning a battle, but he doesn’t celebrate. Instead, he just goes on a run.

When women come near him, he is polite, but he doesn’t seem to have anything approaching interest towards them. He never has a wife. Never even comes close, even though he’s their best warrior. There’s always someone else who’s almost as good, and who talks, too.

He understands English, and speaks some also. No one knows how or when he learned, and he doesn’t offer an explanation.)

Well, they needed him. That’s the thing. They needed him, during the war. Now, not so much. He has become more of a burden than a blessing, and so he rides away, lightens his people’s weight. Looks for something else. Something he was meant to do as a Comanche warrior with no band.

(He wanted to leave.

He didn’t want to leave alone.)

+

Red Harvest tells himself, when he thinks he misses something, anything, and his thoughts, his inner lives aren’t enough, because he keeps thinking they’re not enough anymore, that maybe they never were:

_Every second that goes by, the day is dying, and when the sun falls, it’s gone forever, and you put it behind you. Don’t mourn. Don’t dwell on the past. Survive._

_If there’s nothing left, you find something else._

+

When he meets the six men who will become the closest thing he'll ever have to a band without his own, he's relieved to have found a cause to die for. He's almost taken aback when he realizes that he has connected, that he’s been so busy doing things that he hasn’t even had time to fade away, like it was when he was at war.

The thing is: they’ll never really know him.

That’s the part that makes it easy to feel anything at all towards them, that makes it _possible_. They’ll never know him, and certainly never know him enough to leave him, or to make him leave. They’ll never know him, and so he can give them a chance, and they can give _him_ a chance, because they don’t know what he’s like. They don’t know he’s not what he’s supposed to be like.

And he feels different, anyway. Like maybe the elders were right, and he really was meant to exist somewhere else.

He feels sharper and more present than he has in forever, and all of this leads him to grow fond of the others, even try to bond beside them before the unfamiliar food and surroundings annoy him too much. They seem to actually like him, maybe, especially Sam, who tries his best to speak to him in his own language. Even the Indian hunter seems to warm to him, and Red Harvest, in some way, warms to him in return.

+

Red Harvest sleeps at the outskirts of camp, uncomfortable with the idea of being too close to other people’s vulnerability, other people’s breathing, _other people,_ even if he wants to be, a little. He curls up, and it’s not too cold, so he doesn’t make an effort to cover himself with anything. It’ll just be a burden if he has to get up at night. If there’s some kind of ambush. There could be, and even with someone on watch, Red Harvest isn’t sure that he trusts these people yet, from the white man’s world. He’s never found any reason to trust the white man. The presence of Sam makes him breathe more easily, because Sam is not a white man either, though Red Harvest keeps thinking that he might have been  _something_ that fought against his people, if he was a soldier before.

He could have been a Buffalo Soldier at Fort Sill, but Red Harvest doesn’t mind it so much, because he’s not even sure of that, and at least Sam knows his language. That means something.

And then, Red Harvest doesn’t care much about Horne’s past either. He goes back and forth on whether he should, because the past is past, and he’s not sure exactly what he did except hunt people like Red Harvest who probably weren’t much like Red Harvest or his people at all, because Red Harvest is certain that Horne never targeted the Comanche, and likely not their few allies either. He knows this because Horne is alive.

But he does wonder, sometimes, if Horne knows the difference between Red Harvest and the Indians he killed. He wonders if he thinks they all look the same. He wonders if Horne thinks Red Harvest’s life is worth less than everyone else’s.

Something must have changed in him, though, Red Harvest knows, because Horne hasn’t tried to hurt him. He seems distrustful, but Red Harvest doesn't trust Horne either, even though he doesn’t seem very frightening, half-mad and with his high voice, unused to speaking with others just like Red Harvest but worse; Red Harvest doesn’t even know how many people Horne has seen in the last however-long. Red Harvest is mostly confused by him, and a little fascinated, just as he is with Sam, though he trusts Sam much, much more, as if he has known him since another beginning.

Sam is the one who came up to him and offered him a path with an ending, and who took what Red Harvest offered back without refusing or vomiting it up, and who seems to trust him and believe in his honor even though they are not the same. He didn't treat the offering as a joke, even though it was, a little.

Sam and Horne are even older than Red Harvest’s elders, and he wonders how they made it this far. Red Harvest can’t imagine being old.

Still, Horne distrusts Red Harvest, and Red Harvest distrusts Horne, and Horne is awake right now, when Red Harvest wants to go to sleep.

So Red Harvest doesn’t sleep with one eye open, but it’s a near thing.

He curls up near his horse, and matches his breathing to hers.

Mostly when he sleeps he drifts, rarely actually dreaming. As a warrior, he’s learned to sleep lightly.

He’s only maybe been truly asleep for some short length of time when he hears words drift through his mind. Sam and Horne, talking.

“We’re supposed to trust him?”

“He didn’t attack us. He listened to me and went along.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know. Says it’s his path, I think.”

“Seems odd, don’t it? His being alone, I mean.”

“We’re all alone. Hell, Vasquez was living with a corpse.”

“But why isn’t he with his kind?”

“He was sent away for this path business. Maybe it’s odd, but he ain’t killed anyone yet, and trust me, he could if he wanted to. I’ve known Comanches, fought ‘em, mostly, and he’s something else.”

“You mean he ain’t Comanche?”

“No, no, I mean he’s just…different.”

“Touched, you mean.”

“Maybe.”

“Then how do we know we oughta keep him around?”

“About as well as I know if I oughta keep you around, or any of you, really.”

“Well, I suppose that’s fair. He’s young, ain’t he?”

“Younger than any of us.”

“And what, he just signed up to die?”

“Well, battle’s a good way to go, for his people. For most people, really. And hey, maybe he’ll make it. He’s lived through a lot.”

“How do you know that?”

“I can tell. I can always tell.”

“Well, I guess there ain’t no way you couldn’t, putting together a group like this. Just a bunch of men with nothing to lose.”

“Exactly.”

+

He speaks English to them, the night before they’re all supposed to die, when Goodnight leaves them, because he finds he doesn’t mind them knowing something about him, something _real._

Also, Red Harvest thinks it’s really funny, especially the way Horne reacts.

They talk.

Well, Horne talks. He talks a little about his past. He knows that’s not normal, but he figures that Red Harvest, of all people, deserves to know, yeah?

 _I stopped huntin’ Indians before the government stopped paying for their scalps_ , _mostly ‘cause it wasn’t the kind of job I wanted my children growing up around. I got older and found that I didn’t want my boy thinking it was alright to run around scalping people._

_Much as I distrusted Indians, violent as they may have been, all I was doing was being violent back, and where was the good in that?_

_Violence begets violence, and I wanted my children more inclined towards gentleness, y’know?_

_Before, I thought I was doing the right thing—well, no, not the right thing, but not the wrong thing._

_But I married, had children, realized those Indians I was killing, they had nice families too, and I decided to stop. That’s all. I suppose it was an epiphany. You know what that is? Didn’t imagine so. Well, it’s a big idea that just comes to you. You find something out about life you didn’t know before. Somethin’ like that, at least._

_Sometimes I think of what I’ve done, and I reckon I’m going to Hell. I also reckon I deserve it. Well, worst part really is that I won’t see my wife and kids again…_

He trails off after that, and Red Harvest doesn’t understand a lot of what he says, but he thinks he understands enough. The thing about Red Harvest is that he never learned how to hate, only kill, and in this moment he isn’t inclined to kill. So he says, “The past is past.”

Horne nods. “I think so too. But I still…still thought I’d tell you, so you’d know who you were fightin’ with.”

Red Harvest shrugs. “I did.” Then he pauses. “Your wife. Kids. How’d they die?”

Horne looks taken aback. Red Harvest is a little taken aback too. He doesn’t know why he cares, or if he cares, or if he’s just curious. Red Harvest isn’t very interested in caring for people, but he is curious, he’s just never really had the chance to ask questions. He’s not sure anyone’s ever thought he wanted to _know_ anything before.

Horne swallows hard and says, “Influenza. Don’t know how I didn’t catch it, but I didn’t. They were gone in days.”

Red Harvest nods. “My…everyone, they died of smallpox.” He shrugs. “The end.”

Horne huffs out a strange breath. “The end.”

“Now is the end too.”

Horne nods slowly. “Maybe it is.”

Red Harvest frowns. “Maybe?”

“Well, it ain’t really your choice, whether you die. Someone bigger than us, that’s who decides. And if you’re gonna live, you’re gonna live. Fight like you always fight. There’s always a chance you’ll live, can’t just figure you won’t.”

“I will fight. Always. I am a good warrior, the best. I just think I will die. We will all die. Sam said, probably we all die.” Red Harvest frowns. “What is probably?”

Horne smiles gently. “Maybe not. It means maybe not.”

“Oh,” Red Harvest says. “Okay.”

It’s good to know that, because it turns out that Red Harvest wasn’t supposed to die during the battle. The only thing that dies is the battle itself, fading into the aftermath, and knowing about the _maybe_ means that when he survives, it doesn’t come as such a surprise.

It’s a little more surprising that everybody else survives too, though, especially since some were so badly wounded, like Horne, but Red Harvest is…happy about that, maybe, their continued existence.

He thought that it would be easier if they’d died, because he’d already connected and he’s not sure how to keep that up, but it turned out that he didn’t want anyone to die. He wasn’t _okay_ with anyone dying.

And they didn’t.

So Red Harvest watches everyone survive, and open their eyes, and he’s not unhappy about that and he doesn’t resent it, but when it becomes clear to him that they’re going to make it, he does think that this is another ending, just like everything else, because soon they’ll find out how he is, and he’ll have to go away.  

He sits with the wounded, and wonders if he should just go now, until Sam says that he’s welcome to stay and go on big bounties with him and the others, all seven or maybe just a few at a time, when the wounded are well again, which will be a while, but they have a place in Rose Creek for now, as much as men like them can ever have a place anywhere, so they can rest for a while.

Red Harvest hasn’t rested in forever.

He doesn’t know what to do with himself. This is a problem he has a lot.

+

Sometimes at night he sleeps on the floor of the recovery room that’s been set up in Emma’s homestead. He’s okay with beds, but he prefers something less soft, and there’s not enough beds anyway.

Red Harvest doesn’t usually spend days with the injured, though. That’s when everyone else is there, and the injured sometimes wake, and Red Harvest doesn’t like being around a lot of people, even though at least no one really tries talking to him. Probably they think he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. He doesn’t know if that’s true. In idle moments, he has full conversations with the daydreams and shadows in his head, but then again, in his head it’s much easier. In his head he knows what to say.

He still doesn’t think he’d mind real people talking to him more. It’s just that without him starting the conversation first, there’s not much of a point. Not for them.

(Sometimes Red Harvest wonders if there’s any point to _him._ He knows he’s an excellent warrior, but he’s not sure if that’s enough of a point. What's he supposed to be the rest of the time? He’s not always even sure he exists the rest of the time.)

During the day he climbs on the rooftops and watches the people below, or goes and hunts, or helps rebuild things in town, or rides his horse, or does target practice, or works on his bows and arrows. Skinning animals, making things, that’s woman’s work, but there aren’t really any women here (not true; there are probably more women than men, since they didn’t fight in the battle except Emma, but there certainly aren’t any women he knows other than Emma, and he suspects he’s better at these things than she is) and he’s learned how to do everything himself in the past however long it’s been.

Often, his mind drifts, and he moves through the bigger world in his head.

There are days when he feels so empty and tired that all he can do is ride his horse, feel her movements as she trots along the wide, empty fields. She has been his for years, one of the very best horses because as much as Red Harvest may not have fit in, he was still the best horseman, and he trained her himself.

She’s probably his only friend.

She is definitely the only living thing that knows his secrets.

He tells her, on one of the empty days, “I don’t want to leave. I do want to leave. But I don’t want to leave alone again. I’m tired of being alone. And maybe coming back to town wouldn’t be so bad. There’s lots of space. And I liked knowing that I could go home, before, even if home was my people, not a place. I liked that. I keep thinking the others, they could be my people, or something close, and I could even have a place. One place. But I don’t know if they want me to stay. They do now, because I’m useful, but when there’s no fighting, what am I worth?”

Red Harvest sighs, stroking the side of his horse’s neck. “If I’d died during the battle, this wouldn’t be a problem,” he informs her. “Dying in battle is good. Being alive is only okay.”

+

Some nights, he goes into town and climbs onto the rooftops like he does during the day, and finds some place to lie down, and looks up at the stars.

He spends time up there for the fresh air, when everything is too closed inside. He likes cloud gazing, but he likes stargazing even better. It’s prettier. He wishes he could touch the stars, reach out and pluck one from the sky and see what it looks like and feels like in his hands—blunt and smooth like a river stone or sharp like glass, bright like the moon reflecting off of clear water or the glare of the sun off of a knife, freezing or burning…

But he can’t touch the stars, he knows this intimately, so he settles for finding pictures in them instead.

He lies back and the cool air bites at his skin and fills his lungs, and he lifts his hand and traces the spirits and stories and dreams in the stars—

An arrow.

A battle.

A bear.

A horse.

A home.

+

The first bounty is only with him and Sam and Vasquez, because the others aren’t well enough yet. They complain a lot, or at least Josh does, but Red Harvest says, “You’ll just slow us down and then die.”

Vasquez guffaws, and Sam raises his eyebrows like he’s amused and says, “I couldn’t’ve put it better.”

Josh, who is still limping heavily and has to soak his bandages in lavender to keep the burns on his torso and legs and neck from getting infected, is annoyed enough that it’s ridiculous, because he’s the one who’s most injured, and he’s already more alive than he should be, because people don’t survive blowing themselves up, they don’t survive several gunshot wounds that don’t hit anywhere that important, don’t survive that many arrows either, don’t survive that many gunshot wounds and falling from a roof, they don’t survive all of that _and_ also survive getting hurt just some weeks later.

You don’t get that many miracles.

(You don’t live through smallpox twice. You don’t live through cholera. You don’t lose all your kin in that time without even getting sick. You don’t get by with only a few scars when you spend your whole life fighting. You don’t survive leaving your people and running into a group made up of not-your-people who outnumber you. You don’t survive their probably-going-to-die battle.

Maybe Red Harvest has suffered through so many miracles because they’re not miracles at all.

They’re curses.)

So.

Josh has already had as many miracles as he’s going to get.

The bounty is easy, and he is sharp and present and in his element. It’s a relief.

More wicked men, another town that needs protecting. It’s a band of thieves this time, not too many. Sam, Vasquez, and Red Harvest make quick work of them. Compared to Rose Creek, it’s nothing at all.

Red Harvest is almost disappointed when it’s done, but at least he’s able to go back—home?—and sleep for a long time without dreaming. He prefers it when he doesn’t dream.

+

It’s a problem, when Red Harvest actually dreams. He usually doesn’t, these days. Maybe he does enough of it during the day, so his mind only feels the need to rest in darkness at night. Maybe seeing the stars helps. Maybe Rose Creek helps; the place, even the people.

(The truth is that Red Harvest didn't care very much about the people of Rose Creek. They were just a bunch of white people to him, and even though something inside of him said it was the right thing, the honorable thing, to help them, his feelings about them began and ended with the battle.

At least, he thought they would. It's different, now that he—lives?—there.

He still doesn't think he really cares, but they are something to him now.

The people in a place are part of it, and Rose Creek is Red Harvest’s place, maybe, for as long as it will have him.

He doesn’t interact with the townspeople very much because he doesn’t know what to say to them, and he doesn’t want them to decide they don’t want him around, because he knows that the others are settling in Rose Creek, even if they won’t be there too often.

Sometimes it’s good to have a home camp, Sam said.

Red Harvest agrees.)

Back at the reservation, Red Harvest had more dreams. Bad ones, always, the things he doesn’t remember in the daylight and which always slip away from him without much effort once he opens his eyes. The memories that sometimes slip into his consciousness when he’s awake are always clearer when he sleeps. But he hasn’t been having dreams lately, which is good, because having evil dreams was just another thing that distanced him from the others, and he doesn’t want it to start happening here too.

But it does, and when he’s not even sleeping on the roof. Instead, he’s sleeping on the floor of one of the few rooms in Emma’s house.

He’s not, though. He’s not sleeping.

Instead, he’s standing in the bitter cold, snow melting on his skin, and he is staring up at the fading sun, so dull that it doesn’t even hurt his eyes. He is next to the buffalo hide he has been sleeping on lately, to stay away from the sickness.

There is blood in the snow and on his face, open sores weeping all over his skin, and still he is staring up at the sky because there’s nothing else to do. There’s nothing up there but clouds and snow and the sun going down.

Nothing at all.

Red Harvest knows that there are spirits all around him, in everything, but they are not there with him. They are very far away, or they are snakes slithering under the snow, or under his skin.

In the winter, meat freezes enough that maggots don’t attack it, but the maggots have moved to Red Harvest, under his skin, poking out of the sores, and when he swallows there’s only blood. He doesn’t think he’s eaten in too long.

Now that everyone is sick or caring for the sick or too distracted to remember him, Red Harvest has been hunting for himself and for some of the littler children who are hungry too. He can hear them crying. He can hear them wailing. He can hear women wailing, too, and when he tears his eyes away from the sky, he sees bodies in the trees. They’re not supposed to be there, but there they are. He rubs his hands together, and his palms slough off and drop to the snow.

Red Harvest sits.

He curls up on his buffalo hide.

The snow begins to cover him as he waits to die, and he reaches up and tries to rub away the blood on his face, but it just keeps coming and coming and Red Harvest’s chest tightens as he hears the screaming start again, louder, and he closes his eyes against the blood and covers his ears instead—

“Red,” someone says, and Red Harvest, who will always be a light sleeper, sits up with little effort and finds himself staring into someone’s dark eyes.

His hands are clutching at his head, and he lowers them to use the heels of his hands to wipe away the burn in his eyes instead. Billy is looking at him, eyes narrowed and considering.

Red Harvest blinks. He places his hands flat on the ground, strokes his fingers up the buffalo pelt he’s been using. There’s a woolen blanket bunched up around his waist. It wasn’t there when he went to sleep.

“You were sleeping badly,” Billy says.

Red Harvest shrugs in response and clambers to his feet. “Okay,” he says plainly, because he can’t think of anything else to say, and he doesn’t like the idea that someone saw him have disturbed dreams. That someone could tell he was having disturbed dreams.

It’s not good. It’s not right. It’s not the person they know.

(Red Harvest isn’t sure who the person they know is, or if he’s anyone at all. But they want to keep him around still, so he must be doing something right.)

He hasn’t had dreams in a long time, and it frustrates him that he’s having them now. Again. The beginning of the end.

He feels scattered, and his eyes catch on the sunlight spilling into the room through the window, the way it falls on the wooden floor, the dust suspended in the soft golden yellow rays.

“Red?” Billy says with the voice of someone who has said that more than once. “Are you listening?”

“No,” Red Harvest, who doesn’t usually slip away quite so completely (usually when he doesn’t respond, it’s just because he doesn’t want to, not because he didn’t hear), murmurs. “Was it important?”

“I was asking if you were feeling alright.”

“I’m okay,” Red Harvest says. “I’m okay.”

“Sure,” is Billy’s response as he claps Red Harvest awkwardly on the shoulder and leaves him behind, but not before saying, “You should eat something. There’s food downstairs.”

Red Harvest sees something in Billy’s eyes that he can’t quite understand, but he knows it’s not good. It’s like he’s trying to figure something out.

Like he’s trying to see what’s _wrong._ Red Harvest knows and doesn’t know the answer, because the answer is that no one actually knows what’s wrong with him, just that he’s different.

Touched, Horne called him, what feels like a long time ago but wasn’t, when he thinks about it.

For Red Harvest everything is either _now_ or _then,_ and sometimes _then_ feels closer than it really was, but usually it seems very far away, or it used to. Red Harvest lives in the present, and wherever his mind takes him. Sometimes, when he’s doing things like keeping watch or fighting, the present is everything, as he waits for the enemy from sunrise to sunset, going from inaction to action as easily as breathing. Even when he slips away from the real world, he still has some awareness of his body in space. Where the other bodies around him are. What should and should not be there.

 _He’s just very thoughtful,_ he heard Goodnight say once. _He’s a smart one, Red._

Red Harvest has always been called intelligent. Clever. Observant. He sees everything, and then things no one else sees too.

(He thinks that many people thought that maybe he was destined to be a medicine man, but the truth is that Red Harvest has no talent in healing, only killing, and his visions aren’t quite right, and he doesn’t have the memory of a medicine man either, and…

That wasn’t his path, even though, with how he is, it was the last one that made sense.)

It seems that the others really believe this, though. It’s strange to him, but he lets it be. He lets a lot of things be, and it’s not like it’s a bad thing. They trust him. To them, he is _enough,_ at least to keep around. For now.

He wants to go on another bounty, because the longer they stay in one place, Red Harvest will become less and less to them. He may be alright with a home camp, but he’s still not made for a life where he _stays_ somewhere, without doing what he’s best at, without reminding the people he—cares about?—that he’s useful for something. That they need him.

In the end they won’t, though, once time tells them that he’s not worth it, once the others get better and they don’t need him as much and then don’t need him enough and then don’t need him at all.

Red Harvest thinks that it’s probably a bad thing that he’s grateful that it’ll still be a while until all of the others are healed enough to go on bounties too.

For now, he is confident that they need him enough to overlook everything else.

They seem to like him, though. They talk to him, even if he doesn’t talk back. Ask what he thinks. Act like he is there. They didn’t before, not really, but they’ve become closer, now, and it twists something in Red Harvest’s chest. Maybe his lungs, because it always becomes harder to breathe when he thinks of how he’s a part of their team.

And time goes on, life goes on, and there are more bounties, and first Jack rejoins the team, and then Billy and Goodnight, and finally Josh, nearly a year after the Battle of Rose Creek.

When Red Harvest realizes this, he doesn’t know what to think, because he lives in the moment, because his preoccupation with the future almost seems to have passed.

Once he realizes this, his mind becomes consumed by it again, by the knowledge that this will be over soon.

He has to tell himself this, because he doesn’t want it to hurt when it is over. Doesn’t want to miss this.

(He’s going to miss this.

Miss them.

It’s not a good feeling.)

They really have connected, despite Red Harvest’s efforts, his attempts to stay distant. He and the others, or at least one of them, are usually near each other. Sam or Jack or Vasquez generally insist that he eat with them, even though he still doesn’t like white people food and usually brings his own instead. He listens to the others talk, and it becomes more and more familiar, their voices, their stories. Some of those stories are very amusing, and Red Harvest likes hearing them. He likes hearing them joke, even likes ignoring Jack when he starts going on about something that has to do with the Bible. He likes having a place, likes that the others explain who he is to people who don’t know him very well as if _they_ know him well, remember things about him that he didn’t expect them to. They even defend him, when white people are—well, white people at him.

(Maybe the other six do know him like he knows them. Their actions, their stories. Who they are, how they act. If Red Harvest talked more, he could explain things about the others to strangers too. Could defend them with something other than his glares.)

_Red may not talk much, but he’s a good man, and he’s not a danger to you if you’re not a danger to him._

_Oh, I can guarantee Red’ll have a whole damn map of the place in his head by the time he’s done riding around town. He’s a smart one._

_Now, what kinda question is that? Of course he’s on our side._

_Red is one of the best shots I know. Do not underestimate him._

_No, no, amiga, he’s not angry. He just likes to keep to himself and the people he really knows. Some people are just like that._

_Well, if he’s makin’ you_ uncomfortable, _you can walk right out the door. Jesus, Red, no wonder you don’t trust easy, dealin’ with these idiots all the damn time, lookin’ at you like you’re some kinda menace, I'll show 'em a menace..._

Sometimes it seems so simple, being with them. Being the seventh.

They’re his friends. Red Harvest has never had friends before, and after all that time passes and Red Harvest realizes that he’s become too used to all of this there’s a part of him that wonders why he’s still so caught up in the idea that they will want him to go away when things are so different with them than what they were when Red Harvest had to go away from his first home.

When it has all changed so much.

But Red Harvest knows that nothing ever changes for the better, in the end.

It’s all going to hurt more once they realize that Red Harvest means much less to them than they may have thought, that he is much more trouble than they may have believed. They don’t know him. All they know is who he is now, at this moment, and he’s not sure how much that matters, because they don’t know him at his worst.

(He tells himself so, so often that all that matters is now, but the problem is that just because he tells himself something doesn’t make it true.)

Red Harvest is allowing himself far too much attachment, and he hates how comfortable he is, how he forgets to be wary, how he forgets to remind himself that this is not the rest of his life. That he always ends up alone, and there’s no reason for always to change now. He’s not very young, but he’s not very old either. There’s still a lot of tomorrows, and a lot of yesterdays dead behind him, and the only thing he really knows is that time is going to keep going, and eventually all of these good things will die and he’ll be left with nothing.

Nothing but himself and his big, empty world, even though he feels very present, lately, more than ever, as if his internal universe isn’t quite as necessary now that he has what feels like a place in reality, even if it isn’t a permanent one. It’s easier, now. He may have more nightmares, but when the others realize this, they seem concerned. He always just walks away when they do because he doesn’t want them to get too close to the truth about him, that he’s more disturbed than they thought, but Josh, who claims that his mother was good with medicine, starts giving him valerian root tea, and it tastes bad but Red Harvest finds himself sleeping better.

So his nightmares aren’t so bad, and his waking dreams don’t confine him, mute him, in the same way, and the bounties are good, and sometimes he thinks he’s happy.

The others help him when he needs it, don’t seem to judge so much, but he’s always suspicious. Sure, they deal with Goodnight and the damage the war did. With Jack and his strange thoughts and words. Josh and his drinking. Vasquez and his oddities born of isolation more physical than Red Harvest’s ever was. Billy and his moments of sudden violence.

But Red Harvest knows he’s different. Knows that, in the end, he’ll never be one of them. They still don’t know who he really is. He still doesn’t spend nearly as much time with them as they do with each other. His spoken English isn’t even that good.

They only _think_ he’s part of their team. They’ve made a person out of the shadow he really is, and soon enough they’ll realize that they don’t know him at all. How could they? He still doesn’t even know himself.

It feels easier to be someone, to be _Red Harvest,_ even, when he’s with the others. He thinks he might be learning who he is, but at the same time nothing seems to make sense at all.

Eventually he’s going to start messing up and then he’ll keep messing up and then it’ll all be over.

He tells himself that he’ll leave the very first time it happens, so that they don’t push him out. So that it can really be on his own terms. So that he can pretend it was his choice.

That’s what he tells himself.

+

He’s been better, but he’s not better.

There’s not even anything that makes it happen, that makes him go away, but eventually he starts slipping every once in a while. Another winter draws near, and the dreams start again, but he hides them more successfully this time.

He doesn’t sleep.

But as he sleeps less, his waking dreams consume him more, especially since he’s always trying to _not think about_ things. The cold reminds him of when he was little and people were dying, and then he’s reminded of how he doesn’t even remember that much at all, and yesterday’s dead and buried and lately Red Harvest finds himself wishing he could unbury it, and then he stops wishing that as soon as he can and lets himself disappear inside instead, except even as he goes inside he can still see and hear things he hasn’t for so _long,_ and he doesn’t want to, he wants it all to stay as forgotten as possible, and sometimes he wants to talk to one of the others about it, maybe Goodnight who knows what it’s like to remember too much, but he can’t do that because he doesn’t want them to know that he’s not _alright._

He’s supposed to be alright, that’s what they think so it has to be true because he doesn’t want to have to leave, not yet, he knows so much more now and that’s one of the things he knows, that eventually he’s going to have to leave but he doesn’t _want_ to, he admitted it to himself by accident at some point and—

His world is very big, so there’s a lot of space to step away from the people he cares about, even though they try to bring him back but he can’t let them _do_ that, they don’t want to know the worst parts of him, no one does.

And so he steps away and steps away and everyone looks at him strangely and even with _pity_ but no one asks about it, not yet, at least, and then it’s too late anyway because Red Harvest is in his room and there hasn’t been a bounty in a while and he hasn’t painted his face in too long, hasn’t even mixed paint because he’s just been _tired_ in spite of Josh’s attempts to get him to smile by doing his magic tricks, Vasquez asking him to teach him again how to string a bow because he’s sure he can get it this time, Billy and Goodnight taking him to drink and laughing when he makes a face at the taste of whiskey, Sam telling him of the past, Jack reading, and maybe it’s been helping but not _enough,_ he’s still thinking too much about things he shouldn’t be thinking of, the safety of his mind suddenly not very safe at all _,_ and he’s lying on the floor and staring up at the ceiling and very suddenly he feels like he is nothing, and—

Red Harvest remembers this now, just like he remembers every time it happens.

How it is, how it feels, how it doesn't, because he feels nothing, but not like he usually feels nothing, which isn't feeling nothing, just not knowing what he is feeling.

Now, though, now there's _nothing_ but numbness, as if he's become something other than what he is, or maybe he has become what he really is, unreal, no more human than a drop of rain or a spring breeze, light as a feather even as his heart gallops in his chest and his breath stutters and stops until he gets dizzy and has to breathe again. Darkness encroaches on his vision, ridged by bright light, and he knows nothing and is nothing and when he thinks that no, that can't be true, he was alive just now—but isn't that how death?—but he's not dead—he's a lot of things but he knows he's not dead, just dreaming, but that's not right either—daydreaming, then, lost in his mind, but he can't find his way out so it can't be, can't be—

What _can_ it be, then?

He's dreaming, just not asleep and he can't just come out of it and he’s—

Dreaming.

He draws in a breath and last time this happened something—

Happened?

He just needs to wake up, back into himself, into a mind he can control, into a world he recognizes, any of them is fine but he'd prefer the real one.

The world is smeared like water on glass and he's not in his head, he's not anywhere, in his mind he's safe, in here he’s—

This isn't his world.

He needs to get out.

Needs to wake up. That's all. To get out of a dreamland, even one in what's supposed to be the real world, he needs to wake up.

What did he do last time or the time before that or--has this happened before? Yes, he thinks he's been here before. His eyes are wide and burning and down his cheek he feels slip another little piece of unreality, because Red Harvest doesn't cry.

He sees nothing but a mess of muted colors, feels a blanket pulled over every sensation. His breath is even but the pauses between one breath and the other are longer than they usually are, though Red Harvest can't quite grasp how things usually are anymore. All he knows is that they're not like this.

What did he do last time? What happened last time?

_What did he do last time?_

When was last time?

(Why is he remembering, why does he want to remember? Why does his mind suddenly think that _this is the time_ to remember? He was better.)

Before.

It was before—he forgets. In this place, this dark, distorted place, he forgets everything, and there what he forgets is this and all of the other bad things, and he wants to be back there even though now that he thinks of it back _there_ he’s been remembering more and more too, more and more bad things, and it’s not supposed to be this way. He's possessed, but—he's not.

He knows he's not, and there's a reason he knows that, and this is nothing but a shift in reality, this is Red Harvest but the world's looking at him with its head tilted at an awkward angle and its eyes blurry with tears and he has to fix this, has to remember what he does, what he did last time, but his body does some kind of remembering for him and his body, his body, yes, right, his body—

It reaches out and grabs the handle of a—

It lifts the shining glass to its face and—

There's somebody there, Red Harvest recognizes him, blank expression, wide eyes, tears running down his cheeks, it's him but it's not enough him yet, it has to feel, its body has to feel, change, do something, and Red Harvest's body throws the mirror to the floor and it shatters, pieces scattering across the wood, lamplight making it glitter like—

_springwater_

—and Red Harvest's body falls to its knees and the thumping sound it makes barely sounds like anything over his heart in his chest, the vibrations it sends up the body making something fall back from it into him and he just needs to speed up the process and with steady hands he takes a piece of glass and, with a flick of his hand, a shallow gash appears across his forearm and then another and there's blood warm on his skin when he touches it and pain, there's pain, or something like it, but the body does this and the mind connects it to the body and he brings his fingers to his face and presses them against the skin and there he is, there he—

"Jesus H. Christ, Red, what the fuck are you doing?"

...is.

Red Harvest blinks down at the shallow cuts on his forearm, surrounded by smeared blood and still leaking red, and there is red on his fingers too, blurred as if he'd wiped it off somewhere, and he feels paint on his face and can't remember when he put it on. He makes the connection quickly enough, in his defense.

"That's not paint," he whispers to himself, voice numb even as reality resets; the burning pain in his arm the least confusing part of this situation.

"What'd he say?" Joshua asks.

Sam replies, "Something we already know."

Red Harvest looks up at Sam and Joshua and Vasquez, and he knows what just happened, but can't remember a thing.

Tears run down his face without his feeling the need for them, and Vasquez says, "Oh, Rojito...what happened?"

And all Red Harvest can do is shrug.

_He looks down at his reflection in the springwater and doesn't understand until he sees two thick braids floating away and realizes:_

_You cut your hair._

He remembers, but he’s still not really present, even after the memory comes and goes, his mind going dark and blank, and so there are only bits and pieces that, damn it _all,_ he may end up putting together and remembering in its entirety because _that happens now,_ but at the moment all he remembers is someone telling him to go to sleep, and the knowledge that he had to leave, that his mind slipping so completely after such a long time was a sign, just like his cutting his hair was.

Red Harvest had gone to sleep as the others had urged him to, horror in their eyes that he is sure, given time, would turn to disgust or irritation or simple loss of hope, just like what happened with his people.

He’s not going to give them time. He told himself that as he allowed himself to sleep. Told himself he was going to leave as soon as possible, and he wouldn’t tell them where he was going.

If he leaves now, they’ll still miss him. His memory won’t be ruined by his gradually becoming useless.

But he hadn’t left yet, except he finds himself on a cliff anyway, surrounded by red rocks, bloody lavender-scented bandages discarded at his side.

He’s not in Rose Creek. He’s near, he thinks, but he’s definitely not in Rose Creek anymore.

He thinks very hard, his heart beating a little too fast, and realizes that the dream he was having, the dream where his arms were bandaged and he was moved to a bed and then woke up and left the others sleeping on the floor of the room wasn’t a dream at all. It just felt like one.

He’s still mad, isn’t he?

Good for him for leaving.

He stares up at the sky for what seems like forever as his body and mind settle into an uneasy balance (too little, too late), right until something he didn’t and maybe, somewhere inside that he didn’t know about, did, think would happen, does.

Sam climbs up to stand near him, hovering like a shadow, watching him.

Red Harvest doesn’t understand.

Why would he look for him? Sam is smart, he should understand that Red Harvest was leaving because he wanted to stop all the frustration and pain before it began. He should’ve let him leave, should’ve admitted that it was for the best.

But Sam followed him, and now he’s here, and Red Harvest says nothing, certainly doesn’t say _I want to go home,_ even though the words are rising in his throat like bile, because he doesn’t have a home anyway, and he hopes Sam will just leave, but he knows him well enough to know that he won’t.

He knows so much now, and there are parts of himself that know even more, and sometimes they come into his head and dig their way in there and all he wants is to push them away but he can’t, the world just insists and insists on being real because _he_ is so much more real now and he’s not sure if he likes it, if he wants it, he thinks he’s always wanted it but it’s too hard and he wants to take it back, now, please.

Things have changed.

He has changed.

And the part of him that really understands that, it’s waiting for the rest of him to catch up.

Maybe that’s why he’s remembering.

Maybe it’s that he’s hearing all of these stories of the past, and he doesn’t have any of his own, because they’re all bad, but things have been alright enough that that’s why the memories keep coming now, because he can accept them now, work with them, but he can’t, he doesn’t know what his mind was thinking.

Things have changed, he has changed, but Red Harvest hates change and he hates himself most of the time, so of course he hates _this_ change especially, and he used to be someone he knew and didn’t know, but he was alright with that, with being a shadow, and then he stopped being alright with that and now he wishes he’d just stayed alright with that because he doesn’t think he’s doing this right. He doesn’t think he’s doing life right, doesn’t think he’s doing _being real_ and being _better than he was_ right.

Everything gets worse before it gets better, but it was already better, and now it’s worse, and who says it’s going to get better again?

He is so confused.

None of it makes sense, none of it, none of it, he had started to think he was happy, he was so stupid, he knew that he was going to have to leave, knew it, but then he started just telling himself that and not believing him and—

"Hey, Red," Sam says, casual in a way Red Harvest knows is false, and Red Harvest’s thoughts come back to the world that his body is in as Sam settles next to Red Harvest on the big, jutting rock Red Harvest has been sitting on for what's probably a long time. By now he feels like he is very much part of his world again, of the world again, but there’s still something shaky there. Something far away. It’s familiar in an unfamiliar way, because he used to feel like this all the time, and now he doesn’t.

Not all the time.

Red Harvest furrows his brow and runs a finger down the scabbed-over gash on his left forearm. It's still there, but so is Sam, who is solid next to him, shoulder having brushed Red Harvest's when he sat. He senses Sam's eyes on the ugly, raised, red-purple cut, sees his hand twitch, but Sam doesn't reach out and Red Harvest is relieved. He doesn't really like it when people touch him, especially when it's to still his hands. Maybe it would be different if he reached out first, but he doesn't think he's ever reached out first.

There's something about the thought that makes half a memory flash like lightning in his mind.

He closes his eyes and gives in, tries to remember, and when he does he finds that once again the lightning has set a patch of his mind alight.

This time he doesn't put out the fire or get burned alive, instead he just stands and sees the past on fire in front of his eyes, lets the opening that connects his mind and reality to fall closed.

He has been alive for eight years and his mother is sick, spots blooming on her skin (the spots are darker and redder than those of his father's; her skin is lighter than his, lighter than Red Harvest's too), and her eyes shine with fever. She looks to be in pain, and Red Harvest crawls towards her in the tipi, ready to lie down next to her, let her take him in his arms, but she says, "No, no, you can't," and her voice is hoarse. "You'll get sick."

When you touch the sick, you get the sickness.

This is when Red Harvest realizes that when you touch another person you get all their worst parts.

Red Harvest says, "Mother, you're going to die. If you want, I'll die with you."

She smiles, but there are tears running down her face, seeping into her open sores. They must hurt. It hurts when salt goes into a wound. Red Harvest wants to paint her face how she always does it, white on her forehead, blue on her cheeks, but if he can't touch her, he can't do anything.

It feels like there's a river rushing between them.

If he tries to come closer, he'll be swept away by the rapids unless he holds onto her like a rock, but he can't. His mind slips, and her skin is smooth and painted and she is just resting, just tired, and there's a river rushing between them but Red Harvest knows he will be able to cross it soon, just not now. His mother, whose hair shines in the warm sun, because the snow has melted by now and so has the shade of the tipi, says, in her smooth low voice, "You are a beautiful boy. Do not forget that. Do not forget me. You're old enough now to understand you're meant for greater things than this. I’ll be proud, always, and so will your father, I know it..."

And Red Harvest blinks slowly and his father is there, face painted red and black, and Red Harvest's mother's head is in his lap, and he is smiling down at her in a way Red Harvest has almost never seen. His father rests his hand on the smooth skin of her cheek, and Red Harvest says, "I'll be fine alone."

The sharp edges of his mother's face go soft, and she says, "You don't have to..."

Red Harvest insists, "I'll be fine. Without you. Without anyone."

He tries to smile at her, but she's crying again. "My child, my boy, you're beautiful. You're talented. The happiest moments I've had, I've seen you riding a horse, shooting...you're better than the others. You're meant for special things. Remember. Everyone knows it. It's good, you're good...a beautiful boy...I wish I could see where you'll go..."

Her murmuring doesn't make much sense to him anymore, but he still nods. "I'll remember," he says, but it doesn't feel like a promise.

The world opens again to let in reality, and Red Harvest is still sitting on the rock and Sam is still next to him and he still doesn't know what to think.

That word, her voice, _remember,_ it's echoed in his head for a long time, but only vaguely, and already the startlingly vivid true fantasy is turning to ashes in his mind, but this time he actually buries them instead of just letting them drift away, and feels them grow into a tree, not just a blade of grass or a flower or a bare bush like so many of the other memories he lets himself crush under his feet, the ones that only light up by accident. He knows it'll be there, always, when he sits under its shade, even when it's not on fire.

He thinks, when he pauses for once, turns around, looks back instead of forwards, that there's more trees than there were, and they're bigger.

No wonder the lightning has been striking them so often, if they're so much larger and closer together.

Yesterday doesn't just die, it burns to ashes, but the ashes are still something, they're the soil from which the living things in Red Harvest's mind grow, their smoke the clouds above him, and lately it's been cloudier than it's been in years.

That's probably part of what's kindling the lightning too.

He wonders if it might be as easy as it was this time to look into the burning without blistering his skin, or crawl under one of the trees, and he knows it doesn't make sense, how his world sets itself on fire to make him see it, turns to ashes time and again to make it grow bigger and stronger and easier to lie under the shade and remember without the exhaustion and pain and eventual indifference because today is today and that's what matters and what he's forgotten is probably pain and if it's easier to pass by, why try, he knows enough to be aware of things, aware that what he knows isn't the same as what everyone else does, even though, in the end, it is.

He’s aware of what's there and what's not.

Most of the time.

He doesn't think he's given enough credit for his grasp of the present, since he's usually in the present anyway, doesn't think he's given enough credit for the fact that he knows what's really happening, always, mostly.

Red Harvest thinks that maybe, most of the time, other people have seen him at his worst and thought that that is who he is.

What he's really like.

Red Harvest doesn't know what he's really like, a lot of the time, but he’s learning and he knows it's not the man who ruins things, sliding into a forgotten, broken, unreal past present state.

Mad or blessed.

He thinks the eventual conclusion was both, but only one mattered by the end, with his people.

"The person you saw," Red Harvest stumbles out, because now he wants to explain. Why he left, why he doesn’t want to leave, why he shouldn’t have to leave, why they shouldn’t make him leave, why he has to leave because he just can’t bear that disappointment, that misunderstanding, especially since he knows himself so much better now. This leaving has become more complicated than he thought it would be. He knew they would make him leave eventually, was sure of it, and he’s not so sure of it anymore, and so he’s going to be brave for once and explain because maybe it’s worth it this time, because his mother said he didn’t have to be alone and he only just understood that now. “That wasn't, he wasn't me. Not really."

Sam says, "I know."

Red Harvest doesn't, can't believe him. It's too easy. "Do you?"

"Yes. I know you, Red, I know you're not always like that. It was a bad moment, is all. Like Goodnight has too. Hell, I think we all have 'em."

"Not you."

"No, I don't believe so, but that makes me the different one, don't it?"

"People aren't like me."

"Why should they be?"

"I'm," Red Harvest starts, but then the cliff is crumbling. He grabs onto the back of Sam's shirt to pull him back before realizing it's not real. It concerns him.

Sam looks at him like he's worried too as Red Harvest removes his hand quickly. "What's wrong?" Sam asks.

He's asking about it all, not just about what Red Harvest just did, which must be inexplicable to him and which is uncomfortable for Red Harvest too because he shouldn't think something's happening when it's not, that's not how it works. "Nothing…nothing," Red Harvest mumbles.

"Sure," Sam says easily.

There's sweat on his hand from where he touched Sam’s shirt, and he frowns. "Why do you all wear so much? It just makes you hot."

Sam lets out a huff that Red Harvest can easily place as amusement. "It does, but that's just how it is."

Red Harvest picks up a rock that's in front of him, turns it over in his hands, squeezes it, knows that he is here. "Sometimes things stop being just how they are," he says in Comanche, and his voice comes out more soft and strained than he wanted it to. "They become too much."

"Yes," Sam agrees heavily, also in Comanche.

"Different is hard. It makes, it..." Red Harvest can't find any words in any language, so he falls quiet, clutching the rock harder in his frustration. It makes his palm ache and the skin on his arm pull itself taut. The gashes on his arms hurt more than they did before, and he wishes he hadn't taken off the bandages. He doesn't know why he did.

"Sometimes it seems like it makes everything you know not mean as much, doesn't it?" Sam asks carefully after a long silence, lapsing back into English.

Red Harvest turns to look at his face, surprised. "Yes. It's why I stopped being enough." Sam's gaze is thoughtful. Calm.

Red Harvest breathes more easily and looks away again, out at the setting sun instead, but his body is less stiff than it was. "I was with them. But only until I didn't have to be."

"You think they always knew you had a different path? That you'd be meant to leave one day?"

Red Harvest frowns. Shrugs.

His mother said that. Maybe his mind wanted to tell him something, making him remember that.

"'Cause if I remember correctly, you left not long after the reservation. And I know you're a great warrior. Probably the most talented at what you do. Did you have a vision quest?"

Red Harvest nods, grimacing at the memory, remembering the way everyone else looked at him, with something like disappointment, maybe even sadness, like they'd hoped for something else from his journey. "Maybe that's when they knew. I had to go. Someday. But I..."

"Stayed, 'cause they needed you there, or wanted you there. How old are you?"

"Twenty-eight years," Red Harvest murmurs. He’s not sure why Sam is asking so many questions but is savoring the conversation. He should talk more.

“So you were, what…twenty-six when you met us? When you left? Long time to keep you 'round when they knew you got a different path," Sam points out.

Red Harvest feels a crushing in his chest. "I was useful."

“You know what I think? Don’t answer, I’m gonna tell you anyway. I think they weren't ready to let you go. Not just 'cause they needed you. ‘Cause they wanted to be wrong. Wanted you to be like them so you could stay with them."

Red Harvest furrows his brow. "But...they weren't wrong..."

"Maybe they thought they could be."

Red Harvest shakes his head. “They can’t be wrong."

"Once you got to the reservation, it got obvious that they were, didn't it?"

"They were waiting for me to show...how...I wasn't able to stay..."

"They waited an awfully long time," Sam says. "I guess that whatever happened finally showed 'em they had to let you go, that it was more than time for it to happen. Don’t mean they didn't want you, just that it turned out to be true, no matter what they wanted, that your different path wasn't with 'em."

"But they _didn't_ want me...I had to...had to go because they didn't need me..."

"There's a difference between the two. They had to accept that they didn't need you. Yeah, that's true. 'Cause we needed you."

Red Harvest feels his breath catch. "But I...it stopped...I was more trouble than...now you know."

He grips the rock harder and grinds his teeth and, right, _this_ is why he doesn't talk.

He has too many things to say.

"Did you leave because you thought what happened meant we'd make you?"

Red Harvest says, "As I become less and less needed, you find you want me less and tell me I have to go. Am meant for another thing."

Sam lets out a frustrated sigh. "Didn't I tell you it's not like that with us? Red, we'll always need you, you're part of the team."

"You'll find I'm. not worth the trouble. I was better. With you. Then I wasn’t. And I’m…in the end…not worth it.”

"Then none of us are," Sam says. "We knew, Red. Everyone knows you're different, and when you did what you did, we weren't as surprised as you probably think."

Red Harvest doesn't know if he should be insulted or reassured. "I'm not like that."

"We know that too. Bad moments happen. To us, it's not a sign that it's time for you to go. Just that you're still here and you're human. I'm not gonna say it was easy to see, or that we're not a little disturbed, but maybe it's just a sign you need us as much as we need you. That you're part of this."

Red Harvest briefly lost his mind, carved up his arms, and used the blood as face paint. "Now _I'm_ disturbed, if you think it's a good sign."

Sam laughs. “So’m I, but that’s how it is, I guess. We’re all _different_. That’s what brought us together. We’re supposed to be a team, Red. We’re supposed to be together, all of us, all seven. It wouldn’t be the same without you—hell, it already wasn’t the same without you. We were afraid we wouldn’t find you at all.”

“So was I,” Red Harvest says, and he hadn’t known it was true until he said it. Hadn’t known about the part of him that had hoped that the others would follow. That their different paths really were the same as his.

He finds that his breathing is measured, deep, like he is expanding, taking up more space in reality than he has ever allowed, truly, truly in the moment, here with Sam, thinking of what has been said. Of what he wants. What Sam says feels true, makes sense. It’s what that part of Red Harvest that he always thought was too _happy_ to be right has been telling him for a long time.

Red Harvest’s eyes are drawn to the moon. It’s still light outside, mostly, but the moon, almost full, has already come out, pale against the darkening blue of the sky. This moon has come and gone many times since Red Harvest joined this new band. The church in Rose Creek has been rebuilt for a while now. He and Sam and Vasquez have been on several bounties, and the ones who were wounded aren’t anymore, and have been on several bounties too, just less, and…

Red Harvest finds that he doesn’t want to miss this. He finds that he thinks that maybe he’s supposed to follow what his feelings say and try to stay, this time. That he might have made a mistake in going so quickly, but then, maybe it wasn’t a mistake at all, because now he knows that they will follow.

Red Harvest’s path was always supposed to lead him to a place where he could, in some way, stay. To a group of people who would stand by him.

Who didn’t want to let go of him. Who weren’t _meant_ to let go of him, just as he’s not meant to let go of them.

In this life, this new life, he is what he’s supposed to be, not a waste of space. He was never meant to be a waste of space.

He was always meant to be more.

The elders knew, everyone knew, _he_ knew.

His mother and father knew.

That he was meant to find a path to a place he could always be a piece of.

A place where he could _stay_ enough to make it home.

Someday, Red Harvest thinks he’ll go back to his people and say that he understands. Or maybe he’ll just tell this to the elders when he sees them again, after life ends, that he really does understand now: they didn't make him leave.

They let him go, and it was the right thing to do.

Red Harvest's life has never changed for the better, but time goes on, and if everything changes, so must _change._

That’s why Red Harvest's life has changed for the better this time.

It'll take him a while to be very, very sure, but he can wait.

This path hasn’t ended yet.

The end is not even in sight.

_This is what an adventure is._

“I think it’s time to go home,” Sam says in Comanche.

He’s right.

+

Red Harvest lives in the same world as everybody else, just bigger.

It used to be different, though.

There was too much empty space.

Now, there’s more people, more memories, and more reality than fantasy, because reality isn’t actually so bad.

Red Harvest’s world has changed.

He likes it better now.

**Author's Note:**

> This fills the square for 'rejection' on my hc_bingo, and also marks the first time I've ever gotten a bingo ever.
> 
> Huge thank you to within_a_dream for betaing.


End file.
